TheGIVE was founded by John Mallinger — a former PGA TOUR professional and Long Beach local — and is co-hosted with Jamie Mulligan, the renowned instructor whose roster includes Nelly Korda and Patrick Cantlay. The tournament returns to Virginia Country Club year after year, and the brief for our coverage is simple but unforgiving: capture every meaningful moment, deliver day-of content for social, and produce a recap film worthy of next year's invitation packet.
The event
TheGIVE is an invitational charity golf tournament hosted at Virginia Country Club in Long Beach, California. It combines competitive play, evening hospitality, donor recognition, and on-course storytelling — all in service of raising over a million dollars for partner foundations.
Beyond the round itself, the week is built around the kind of access most events can't offer. The signature evening included a Q&A panel with John Mallinger, Jamie Mulligan, and PGA TOUR winners Charlie Hoffman and Colt Knost — unscripted, candid, and exactly the kind of moment that doesn't happen twice.
The sponsors and partners
The tournament's lead sponsors included Farmers & Merchants Bank and apparel partner TravisMathew, with on-site activations that needed to be captured cleanly alongside the play itself — brand visibility without ever feeling like a logo wall.
The challenge
Charity tournaments live or die on hospitality. The photography can't disrupt the play — but it also can't miss the moments that drive next year's giving. Coverage has to be invisible during the round and indispensable afterward.
The best photography on a member event is the work no one notices in the moment — and everyone remembers afterward.
Three constraints we planned around
- Coverage continuity. Three days, two photographers, one cinematographer, zero gaps in the run-of-show — from the opening tee through the evening panel.
- Same-day social. Selects pushed to social within hours of capture, without compromising final-edit quality.
- Donor and pro moments. Quiet, intimate captures of conversations, presentations, and the Q&A panel with Hoffman, Knost, Mallinger, and Mulligan — with permission and discretion.
How we covered it
We pre-walked the course with the tournament director two weeks out, marking the moments that mattered: the opening tee, the par-3 charity hole, the donor lunch, the panel staging, and the closing handshake. Each got a designated coverage owner and a backup angle.
On the day, two photographers split the field while a third roamed the clubhouse, sponsor activations, and panel staging. Our cinematographer ran a gimbal-stabilized cinema setup for the recap film, with a backup mirrorless rig for B-roll and interviews.
Same-day social
We ran a shuttle pipeline: cards offloaded every two hours to a roving editor stationed in the clubhouse, who pulled six to eight selects per shuttle and delivered them to the social manager via a shared drop folder. Average time from capture to ready-to-post: 90 minutes.
The deliverables
- 800+ edited high-resolution photographs delivered in a curated gallery
- A 3-minute hero recap film, premiered at the closing ceremony
- Vertical social cuts delivered same-day across the tournament week
- A donor recognition reel for the closing dinner
- Panel coverage — stills and B-roll — from the evening Q&A
The outcome
The tournament closed at over $1M raised — a record year. The recap film became the lead asset for the following year's invitation packet, and the panel coverage gave the foundation a content library that traveled across sponsor channels for months after the event.
More importantly, members, donors, and the pros on the panel mentioned the photography unprompted in their post-event feedback — which is the result every premium event is really chasing.
